


Too hot for habits

by foughtyen



Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Genre: Anxiety, Blow Jobs, Established Relationship, M/M, some mention of Shimizu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:36:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28675329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foughtyen/pseuds/foughtyen
Summary: Haruna has a suggestion for how Akimaru can get better.
Relationships: Akimaru Kyouhei/Haruna Motoki
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Too hot for habits

**Author's Note:**

> additional cw for mention of medication
> 
> This has been sitting nearly finished in my wips since 2017 oops

Locker room light slips through the spaces between Akimaru's wet fingers, reddened through his eyelids. He squeezes his eyes, cramps his fingers to make black. It sounds like everyone is gone, or so the silence says. No voices or cleat clacks, just raindrops on roofing.

This way come footsteps and huffing breaths. Haruna's voice warns, "This is what it's what it's gonna be like as a regular. There’s no substitute for practice."

One arm in and one arm out of his practice jersey, Akimaru sits like a ragdoll, neck back, hips forward, on the verge of sliding off the bench. In a way it suits him. Other players curl up to protect their hopes like fragile flames, might keep their backs rigid to support the weight of both a body and an ego. Akimaru opens his to the wind, lets them fizzle and fade like cold-smothered sparks.

Haruna plops down beside him. The old wood creaks. The antiperspirant in Haruna’s ocean mist body spray does double time. The air reeks of sweat and chemicals with tongue-twister names.

Akimaru lets his body lean towards him in the sightless sea of thoughts, a flow inevitable as gravity. The bench shrieks again. Never in a million years would it give way. That’s what they are, what they have: deep stability beneath a tempestuous surface, a miracle of renewable energy if only this infinite generator of conflict could be harnessed.

Akimaru slicks back his hair, reaping drops of sweat-rain slurry at the vees between his fingers. His mind renders the perfect parabola from home to first as he groans, rendering millennia of linguistic evolution frivolously unnecessary. His botched throw against Nishiura plays crystalline against his eyelids—in a loop of remembering it, trying not to remember it, remembering it—and the first-year chorus of _don't mind, Akimaru-san!_ ringing in his ears. At some point, all the sequences of coordinated thought necessarily blur into the elementary action of throwing a ball. He covers his face with his hands, hears his ragged breathing grow slowly steadier, as amplified the shallow curvature of his own creased palms.

“Hey.” Haruna elbows him, a not-too-big smile of _cheer up why don’t you_ hesitating on his face. "You're running more, lifting more, swinging more. it all looks good. Something good will happen. We just have to wait." Haruna says with deliberate delicateness that sounds affirmingly unlike pity. He adjusts his jersey, straightening a mantle of rain-grayed fabric.

The metal plane of nearest locker soothes Akimaru's neck like leaning into an iceberg. His hands unveil a look waxy and sheened with frustration. "You know, maybe I liked it better when you weren't so attentive." His gaze floats to the ceiling, setting Haruna in the periphery. "I feel like I'm holding you back. Can I say that?”

It _is_ technically true, in the scathing, pointedly factual way that Akimaru has mastered, smothered in phrasing that sounds like self-pity. _You_ , not _Musashino_ , not even _us_.

Haruna swallows a frown. Besides Shimizu, the underclassmen are wholeheartedly supportive of Akimaru’s improvement endeavors. it helps that Haruna has a stare like a lightning strike and a quick tongue to smite nonbelievers. even Shimizu gives two-thirds of a heart of support, so it dents his pride that Akimaru hasn't learned to reciprocate.

"Like how?" old habits are hard to break, but Haruna schools his face smooth, unwrinkles his brow. He knows what answer he expects, but having Akimaru say it will be good for him. Identifying a problem is the first step towards a solution.

"I'm not just pitting my body against itself. It's in my head too."

That wasn’t the answer Haruna was expecting. Heck, with a little wordsmithing, it could even be motivational. Haruna scolds himself and notes the chill that rises stomach at even the suggestion that he could be underestimating Akimaru.

"It’s not the thought that _I gotta go 110%_. It’s— I get nervous. My fingers twitch like I'm a puppet, but usually I’ve done whatever it is I’m doing so many times it doesn't matter." Akimaru's body yields a loathing shiver. "Like throwing or whatever."

"If I didn't play baseball I'd think you were a weirdo for saying that, but I get it. The last part at least. _If I could throw farther, hit better, run faster_ — you train your body so you can trust it."

“Yeah.”

"But you're doing your best."

Akimaru perks up.

Haruna stands with his feet spread wide, diamonds of air between his torso and arms: his captain look. It feels silly, not _funny_ but _affected_ , talking to Akimaru like this, like using keigo at school with life-long friends because a late birthday made you a kouhai. 

"You told me you’re trying and I believe you. I'm gonna want to rush you." Fake it till you make it. Haruna's tongue feels like taffy, but doesn't lie, says what needs to be said. "If I’m bad, as the one overseeing your improvement, I might even act on that. But you need to hear it from me at least once, that I see the work you put in."

Drops of water bead at the ends of Haruna's gathered bangs and go smooth against the sides of his face, racing to his jaw. He waits for a sign that even a little of Akimaru's obstinacy has withered.

Leaving the conversation here could be enough, Akimaru thinks, an incomplete and unelaborated understanding that would let him carve out space should the need arrive. He wipes unevaporated sweat from his brow, squeezes his focus like a tube of toothpaste. It's hard to distill the intensity into words. You don't say _I become a sentient earthquake that rattles only my own bones_ without spotlights and stage makeup, but he tries.

"The only time I feel alive is when my heart is pounding like I'm going to die. Half the time I’m on the floor in my room, but the other half is when I’m out there, facing you. So if I’m going to _feel alive_ , I'd rather do it with you around."

Haruna blushes. the captain act fades, cracks, dissolves into the background noise of rolling thunder and sloshing rain. Akimaru knew him well before he learned it; he knows how to see past it. The air between the lockers rings with the aftershocks of raised voices.

"So worry if you want, but don't tell me how things are going without knowing how they really are."

"You just told me how things are, and I still— no, _we_ still want you. Your pounding heart is just part of the package."

Akimaru tilts his head, flashing light off his lenses, and raises a palm in disagreement. "When I—when any player steps onto the field, it shouldn't matter what petty argument he had in the locker room before the game, or what plans has with his teammates after."

Haruna's vow of patience after the Nishiura game can only be so effective. He's managed to curb the knee-jerkiest of his reactions, but before the thought finishes, his forehead warps into _you're wrong_ , buoying the inner edges of his eyebrows. "You're saying on some level every player is just a moving part—"

"Not that mechanical. Players can have character and personalities and whatever, but if _I_ can't leave my nerves in the dugout, I drag us down."

"Are you telling me you think I should let Shimizu have your spot? For the good of the team?"

Akimaru gulps. Haruna trying to use his words against him is a sign of desperation. It means Haruna's cornered too.

Haruna sits and leans into Akimaru’s shoulder. In short sleeves, their skin sticks readily together. It’s hotter than hot, but still feels like a loss when he slips his hands between his knees and breaks contact. "You can answer that honestly," he says, voice startlingly soft.

"I wouldn't like that," Akimaru strains, like a pearl diver retrieving each word from his lungs and presenting it on his tongue.

"Good." Haruna smiles. "They know you're a work in progress. Because they're all works in progress." He kisses Akimaru gently, closed lips, closed eyes, listens to him breathe in. Kind of happily too, he hopes he doesn't merely imagine. "That's a work in progress too." _The more we do it, the more we can trust it._

They listen to the rain crescendo, the metronomic tap of a hundred thousand droplets on the roof.

Haruna stands again. "I wouldn't like it either, you know. Making Shimizu a regular. I pitch best to you, and you're the only one who seems to forget that." He wipes a brackish mix of rainwater and sweat from his brow emphatically, but also to keep the drops from stinging his corneas.

Smile is a strong word for what Akimaru tries to do. His lips make a desperate attempt to show his teeth.

"Fair or not, we all face ourselves every time we step onto that field, so—" Haruna's face incandesces with inspiration. He sets his hands on Akimaru's thighs and squeezes. "I'm wondering something.”

"Whatever you’re thinking is bound to be terrib—"

Tying the word off with his lips, Haruna kisses him quiet and fumbles with silver button above Akimaru's crotch. Turning his face Akimaru's torso, he asks in an exaggerated, sultry murmur, “does your heart race at the prospect of being caught?

Akimaru sighs skyward. "Hm, with you? No one would be surprised, honestly."

“No, think it out. What if you could deal with the heart stuff before a game? Let it beat a little fast, so that come game time, no stress. I’m brilliant.”

Akimaru becomes a moth in the tug of Haruna's light. His torso sways as he can't decide whether to lean into or away. "The body is irrational, but it really doesn't work like _that_."

"Okay, fine, fine." Haruna lifts his hands from Akimaru's legs.

Akimaru snatches them back, eager like a mousetrap. “I didn't mean for you to stop!" His yell fits unevenly into a raspy hiss.

“Alright, back to our regularly scheduled programming.” Haruna licks his lips, twists his left hand, and swirls his tongue illustratively. “Bet you've never been serviced by a southpaw. Compared to the usual, it's a whole ‘nother experience."

"You say that every time" Akimaru's mouth bends up at the corners anyway. “ _Anyway_ , I’m glad we could have such a _serious_ talk."

"Hey. It's not done yet. This is part of it.”

"God..." Akimaru covers his face with his forearm.

Haruna parts the white flaps of the practice uniform, lets his fingers wander up the solid slant of Akimaru's ribcage. They curl in when the body beneath them draws away, ticklish. "What you were talking about before, Nao's best friend has something like that. She takes pills for it. Do you know about those?"

Akimaru nods. "I have an appointment scheduled."

"Mm, good,” Haruna mumbles either at Akimaru meeting his mental health needs or at the pale skin of Akimaru’s stomach and its excited up-down. He perches his lips at the top of a thin happy trail beginning its journey to a thicker band of hair. There's a metaphor there along the skin between belly button and waistband, one Haruna couldn't care less about as the heat of his mouth radiates around Akimaru's shallow navel. Any dampness here is from sweat and not from rain. Haruna presses firmly against the flesh, considering its salt.

He pulls at Akimaru's boxers, then snaps still. "I'm happy you felt you could tell me." Then there's pressure around Akimaru's waist with the zipper's minute _bvvvvvp_ before Haruna's hands work his pants to the cold ground, where his belt rings like a carnival game. Winner!

"Here goes nothin'," Haruna says through a smile like a papercut. He positions his cleats on the ground, kneels onto the laces, and spits thick into his cupped palm.

"Yeah—h—" Akimaru reclines against the lockers, head back.

Haruna puffs warmly against Akimaru's cock, pressing lips to the tip. Akimaru shivers as Haruna's hand strokes slowly.

"—" he holds Akimaru's cock in his mouth. Akimaru's voice heaves like a sidewalk full of roots as he grows. He grips the bench, earns an imprint of the grain in his palm and fingers.

What a weird feeling, sensing Haruna's smile without seeing it.

If there was a way to somehow worsen the experience of going to the dentist, this is probably it, Haruna thinks. Going down hits the gag reflex, the taut cheeks tingling with lactic acid. No dry mouth though, that’s a plus side. Endless spit. If sugar-free lollipops were as good as orgasms—well, it still wouldn't quite compensate for the thousand threads of pubic hair against his lips and in his fingers.

Haruna positions Akimaru's hand on his own head and leaves it there. Maybe it's embarrassment that will wear away with the novelty of things, but Akimaru doesn't talk much; even hand jobs are wont to become a verbal one-way street, with Haruna always being the one to ask how things are going. Not that he'd be much conversation here, what with his mouth full of Akimaru's _nonverbally expressed eagerness_. It's paradoxical, Haruna notes: this act where handling the most vulnerable parts renders one largely unable to communicate. 

Haruna's learned to get feedback in other ways. Akimaru’s learned to give it. They have signals. Words would be ideal, but Akimaru gets a pass for now, what with all the words in his lungs for today scattered and spent in dust. Haruna listens for wrinkles in breath, reads the tautness of Akimaru's stomach with his free hand. he considers it a form of repayment for Akimaru learning to read him. There’s no small amount of irony in trying to leave the imprecision of communicating in touches and gestures behind, but this is a new dimension to their relationship, one where Akimaru hasn't disappointed him yet, and there are new rules. Here it's not regression. Since Akimaru is a complainer, silence is a form of enthusiasm. He’s said so.

Yet for choice of venue, his knees flattening the heels of his spikes, the dirtied white of a practice uniform bobbing in the outskirts of his vision, Haruna still finds himself listening to Akimaru's body and wondering _what are we going to do with this?_ It's a shame Akimaru hasn't been able to consider anyone with a jersey number greater than his own. But maybe, Haruna thinks, Akimaru thinks of him first because that's the only relationship he's truly secure about. He can make the throw to the mound. He can give signs. These are the things Haruna tries to untangle as Akimaru's fingers swirl and tighten in his hair.

Akimaru touches behind Haruna's ear. Means _good_. Squeezes the lobe— _uncomfortabl_ e. Haruna circles the frenulum with the tip of his tongue and watches Akimaru's limbs draw in. He draws away, bringing his lips to slow rest around Akimaru's head. Haruna watches his hips push forward, curious and curiously satisfied with this new power he was over him.

It's a small kind of thing, reading the body. Best done up close, eyes and face. Haruna wonders why he's failed to do it before; a shaking hand's tiny tremor might be disguisable behind home plate but on the bus before, on the bus ride after? Overlookable when you don't look for it, if Akimaru's good at hiding it.

He doesn't hide it now. Balance shifts in the pattern of tension and release, rest and motion of muscle. Haruna switches to his hands, cups one over Akimaru's head and pumps the other with an infuriatingly leisurely rhythm.

Haruna mentally verifies that he has a spare sock to wipe up, but remembers that anything that makes it in his bag will be imprisoned there for a good two weeks. The stench is already unbearable without semen. "You know what, today I’ll swallow."

Akimaru nods tightly as his consciousness collects behind squeezed eyelids.

"But now that I have your attention," he pauses. Talking exacerbates the elastic ache near his molars. "We don't play alone, the two of us. Remember that."

Akimaru's brows knit in irritation over an otherwise dazed expression.

"That's all I'm gonna say."

Fingers curled together means Akimaru is close. His stomach tightens, breath leaving in billows. Haruna purses his lips and blows steadily along the length, thoroughly licking up and down before taking it in for the last time.

"Oh _fuck_ —" An emanation of compression and rarefaction, echoing from organ to organ. Lighter than air, it reaches his ankles and the tendons of his toes before it roars through his body, shimmering like the northern lights, electrons pounding on the stratosphere. A moment, a string of blissful absences as the mind shakes itself back into the world, leaving its vessel wonderfully crumpled and slouched.

Haruna keeps his word, gives another clean-up lick as the last little white bead of ejaculate trails off, then wipes his hands on his pant legs and digs a bottle from his duffel. His cheeks puff as he swishes and downs a gulp of Pocari Sweat, brows peaking like he's about to say something clever. Here it comes.

"I'm gonna be flossing out pubes all week. You better work hard." With his clean hand, he gives Akimaru a slap on the back that cracks like a bellyflop.

"I can trim them you know," Akimaru slurs, speech still slow as he swims in endorphins, heart still beating angrily against his temples and all his skin. “If you’d like that.”

"No, I wouldn’t!” Haruna lies for Akimaru’s sake. “Don't try and shirk!" he scolds, lifting the strap of his bag over Akimaru's head. "Here, carry. C'mon, let's go home."

"I didn't sign up for this," Akimaru groans.

Haruna hooks Akimaru's neck in his elbow, grip like a nutcracker, and grins cheek to cheek. "Harunas are non-refundable!" he shouts so it echoes through the hallways. "All sales final!"

Akimaru says nothing, thinking.

Haruna pats him on the head.

Akimaru laughs. "You implied I found you in clearance," he ruminates for a moment. "Good.”

The pat turns into a noogie.

**Author's Note:**

> title: a mishearing of Holy Roller by Thao & the Get Down Stay Down that felt appropriate :)


End file.
